A great example is Mark Zuckerburg (http://www.forbes.com/profile/mark-zuckerberg/), who was a Psychology major at Harvard. His interest in coding has made him one of the youngest billionaires in the world, $26 billion as of yesterday. He used his coding skills to hack together a crowd sourced website for an art class at school.
“I emailed this to the class list and said, ‘Hey guys, I built this study tool.’” Grades on the class had never been so high, Zuckerberg says.
Our schools are trying, but they are falling short. Computer classes in the US are relegated to speed typing tutorials, spreadsheets and playing candy crush. This is further compounded by the lack of qualified teachers and the lack of action being taken by our educational system.
Last year, the UK set guidelines for teaching their students basic programming and computing skills. There are as follows,
The curriculum would see children aged between five and seven being taught what algorithms are and how they are implemented as programs.
And by age 14 children should have mastered a range of computing skills including:
- designing computational abstractions that model the state and behaviour of real-world objects;
- understanding at least two commonly used algorithms for sorting and searching;
- using two or more programming languages, at least one of which should be a written programming language, to solve a variety of computational problems. They should be able to create data structures such as arrays and use functions to write modular programs;
- understanding how simple Boolean logic, such as AND, OR and NOT, is used to determine which part of a program is executed;
- understanding the hardware and software components that make up networked computer systems and how they interact;
- understanding how various data types can be represented and manipulated in the form of binary digits.
So, how can you get your child started coding even if you aren't a programmer.
Visit the following resources:
Developed at MIT, Scratch is designed especially for ages 8 to 16, it allows you to program your own interactive stories, games, and animations — and share them. You can share this link which includes teaching resources with you school - http://scratched.media.mit.edu/
"Codecademy is an education company. But not one in the way you might think. We're committed to building the best learning experience inside and out, making Codecademy the best place for our team to learn, teach, and create the online learning experience of the future.
Education is old. The current public school system in the US dates back to the 19th century and wasn't designed to scale the way it has. Lots of companies are working to "disrupt" education by changing the way things work in the classroom and by bringing the classroom online."
"Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a freely available teaching tool designed to be a student's first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games. In Alice, 3-D objects (e.g., people, animals, and vehicles) populate a virtual world and students create a program to animate the objects."
"Hackety Hack will teach you the absolute basics of programming from the ground up. No previous programming experience is needed!
With Hackety Hack, you'll learn the Ruby programming language. Ruby is used for all kinds of programs, including desktop applications and websites."
